Prison pay telephones are designed to mitigate a potential for inmates to physically harm themselves or others with their use. Some prison pay telephones are absent any inmate-accessible cords, such as a cord that would couple a handset to a body of the phone or a cord that would couple the phone to a telephone network. This prevents inmates from hanging themselves either directly on a cord or on clothes hung on the cord, and from pulling an element of the phone off the cord to use as a weapon.
To eliminate inmate-accessible cords, a prison pay telephone can be mounted to a wall, and can have its earpiece and mouthpiece mounted to a face of the telephone. Since this type of prison pay telephone has no handset to hang up, an on/off hook switch button is provided. The earpiece, the mouthpiece and the on/off hook switch button barely extend from the face of the telephone. U.S. Pat. No. 6,512,828 to Styron discloses an example of such a prison pay telephone.